The Recog

People are having a great deal of trouble recognizing societal changes occurring because we had grown accustomed to direct technological change reconfiguring society so that is where we now look. You know, the arrival of computers, of cell phones and then smart phones — that sort of obvious introduction and adoption of a discrete physical good.

But we’re beyond that now, and that’s what’s causing confusion and the absurd claim that no change is occurring. To return to the ideas of the cybernetic philosophers, we are not being directly affected by the technology itself (contra and also moving beyond McLuhan) but rather the now-exponentially more complex cultural and cerebro-cybernetic reconfigurations that occur and can occur in this ever-expanding realm of informational combinatorial explosion.

So, everywhere everyone is looking for new technology that is not arriving and conclude the world is not changing. But in a sense, we’ve reached a plateau where the tech that used to be physical and available for inspection as an entified object has now been completely subsumed into and instantiated in a virtual realm where its unfolding is less apparent but no less instigative of effects and alterations of the mind and of the world. Rather, it’d be accurate to state that this virtual realm and the world are now selfsame, and that lack of comprehension of this momentous reformation of how we gestate ideas culturally is what is responsible for a large part of the befuddlement.